Global Resource Constraints and ICT-Enabled Lifestyle Changes

Rationale
There is a remarkable convergence in the assessments of the sustainability of worldwide resource consumption that have been recently carried out -independently from each other- by various multidisciplinary research projects, environmental NGOs, industrial associations and even military think tanks. They all point to the possibility of our society being hit by a "perfect storm" resulting from the convergence of environmental, energy and financial global crises, which are due to a lack of long-term sustainability of our current model of progress (ref.). There is an increasing awareness that these challenges could be the harbingers of a more permanent change in the way humanity needs to organize itself for well-being and survival.

This initiative will not indulge in catastrophic considerations about the current trends of resource consumption. It aims to seek and constructively propose global solutions exploiting the potential of ICT and Web 2.0 to build resilience in the face of possible abrupt changes.

Intriguingly, the above-mentioned sources also concur in indicating ICT as the main tool that can, mostly due to its ubiquity and reach, ease this transition.

The Green economy concept
To build such resilience, individuals and organisations will have to develop and put into practice a stronger environmental consciousness, by adopting new lifestyles embracing the habit of "doing more with less", or the 3R principle: reuse, recycle, repair. This means moving towards a Low-Carbon or "green" economy, based among others on a post-consumerism attitude.

Sustainable business models: "Business as usual" may not be possible anymore in many areas, but at the same time new business models and opportunities will appear, oriented to the vision of the sustainable enterprise.

Individual and local efforts for the global mindshift: at a social level, citizens and local communities will try getting local benefits from globalisation changes, balancing the efforts on individual lifestyle with the collective results which are needed.

The new parameters of welfare: from monetary to ethical. From a political point of view, the effectiveness of policies will not be measured anymore in pure monetary terms but will take into account also non economic parameters related to well-being, quality of life, environmental conditions, community values (HDI, GNH, HPI, etc.), in line with the Commission's "Beyond GDP" and related initiatives.

What role for ICT in behavioural changes?
ICT has been the main driver behind most of the dramatic workstyle and lifestyle changes which have taken place in the last decades: productivity increases, new businesses, new advertisement paradigms, new economic models (e.g. skype, google, apple, cloud), ubiquitous access to information, borderless and multicultural online social networking, personal expression and web 2.0, new copyright models – not to mention emerging cybercrime.

Web 2.0 in the sustainable paradigms shift. It is reasonable expecting that ICT will also play a key role in implementing a more sustainable way forward, by enabling drastic changes towards an environmentally-friendly way of living and a sustainable economic development. Web 2.0 is already a symbol of how ICT can be used not only as a particularly important technological component in the growth, business and consumption aspects, but also as a tool to empower individuals to connect to each other, to cooperate (e.g. through wikis) in a distributed manner, to create and share their own information/content through the network, and as a way of delivering government services.

Even though the fundamentals of the current Internet are gradually shifting towards a more controlled and business-oriented marketplace, a parallel trend can be envisioned which will see people more and more cooperating and sharing opinions and knowledge online across borders of any kind (geographical, cultural, linguistic, social). Several examples are available, for instance: ICLEI, Local governments for sustainability; SPREAD, sustainable Lifestyles 2050; Code for America.

Cooperating, sharing knowledge, getting real-time and easily understandable information on the resource consumption or the impact of consumption decisions on carbon footprint, and comparing (even ranking) individual lifestyles against some ecological/ environmental benchmark, could be a powerful tool to foster behavioural changes. At the same time it leaves people in control of their sensitive information, enabling them to choose how (and if) to change their behaviours.

Social networks for social impact. ICT can enable the diffusion of new daily practices and forms of organisations based on sharing, exchange, and participation at the local and global scale. This has the potential to regenerate the social fabric, creating meaningful bonds between individuals and therefore resulting in the creation of new sustainable ways of living.

In this vision ICT is not expected to be used by a central government or organisation to summon or to influence people, but to create two new tools: a new level of distributed situational awareness about the problems of the planet and the citizen's own individual behaviour in relation to the global situation, in real time, and an awareness of networks and potential communities ready to support behavioural change. This support can be in terms both of collective local action and of local bottom-up activism to strengthen regional or national cooperation and government intervention.

This social innovation would be enabled by "platforms for collective awareness and action" exploiting paradigms from both Wikipedia and Facebook, for instance as a decentralised and federated social network interfaced to globally connected networks of sensors or Internet of Things. The content and the stakeholders of such networks would be at the centre of their technological foundations. The resulting situational awareness can have concrete impacts, for instance in empowering (and motivating) citizens to make informed decisions and consumer choices.

Such platforms will foster a collective and creative process of change, posing crucial questions to tackle our biggest societal challenges, such as: What do we mean by sustainable lifestyle? If we agree to change some of our routines, how do imagine wellbeing in future Cities? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?

How to move forward
The first step needs identifying and involving stakeholders in the recognition of the problem and in the discussion of the role of ICT in behavioural changes for sustainability, in order to take stock of the existing initiatives and to approach in a coordinated manner all the open issues listed above. A broader consultation is needed with social media, democracy thinkers, environmental organisations, industries, active projects and citizens. This can initially be articulated in a series of workshops and supported by a dedicated website with Web 2.0 functionalities.

A further step would consist in setting up a more permanent collaboration mechanism (forum? Network?) for integration/coordination of efforts between different initiatives.
A relevant milestone would then be the definition of related research priorities for FP7/FP8, and the possible definition of pre-procurement guidelines in related areas.
Articulation with other programs is also sought, as this approach is fully in line with the global EU2020 Strategy, in particular with the flagship on Sustainable Growth.

Open Issues

Stakeholders
Which organisations/industries/agencies/projects/NGOs are playing a key/leading role in lifestyle changes? Which ones would be interested in driving such a project, or providing/moderating useful content? Which ones are the "agents of change" which would be seen by the public opinion as the most credible? Which ones will be the most influential in order to involve communities and "social entrepreneurs"?

Governance
How would such a network be governed? Through some degree of governmental implication, as a kind of centralised "public service", or in a totally distributed manner, in a "wikipedia" or ad-hoc/mesh mode? Which models would be more easily accepted? Which models would be most effective?

Research issues
The timescale for implementing this kind of ICT solutions means that most of the examples mentioned will have to be implemented by integrating existing technologies. Broadly speaking, the feasibility of a "social innovation platform for sustainability aware lifestyles and for collective action" is not critically dependent upon the availability of specific technological breakthroughs, but will require advances in several S&T multidisciplinary challenges:
• Availability of global pervasive networking and data handling infrastructures, allowing ubiquitous, broadband (wired or wireless, ad-hoc, mesh, cooperative) and low-cost access possibilities for all citizens, which may be based on open source software and open standards/specifications;
• Availability of cooperative tools for aggregating/ organising/ augmenting/ sharing information and knowledge generated in a distributed manner, by humans and machines/sensors, with awareness of privacy issues and identity management;
• ICT R&D applying the concept of "reusing" to most of the investments made to date by ordinary citizens, to increase their socio-economic value, for instance by upgrading products to make them more energy efficient, or limiting the number of rare earths that go into the making of computer and telephone equipment;
• Ability to manage not only textual information but also multidimensional data, which may also include statistics, presenting them in friendly formats (e.g. gapminder);
• Capability to automatically enrich the information spaces with semantics (for searching and filtering, e.g. to select the most eco-friendly alternative for a trip or a purchase);
• Creation of a strong link between the physical reality and the virtual information accessible though the internet, by integrating physical and virtual worlds, also using intuitive and immersive user interfaces and interaction;
• Ensuring mutual trust between people (seen as users of this network), which requires appropriate techniques and policies to manage ownership, identity, reputation and privacy, through multidisciplinary research on social and psychological impacts, including studies on human motivation that drive collaborative innovation;
• Development of multimodal multicultural interfaces (for humans and machines). A key element in this respect will be the availability of (multilingual) Natural Language Processing capabilities.

Ethical aspects
How to address, possible beforehand, the privacy implications of a network of people and sensors and the sharing of individual data? Can an "opt-in" mechanism be sufficient to prevent such a pervasive system being used by commercial actors for extraneous purposes, for example behavioural targeted advertising?
eParticipation: can such a network also allow people to rank policy options or priorities? Can this have an impact on political stability? Can this have an impact on democracy?

Sustainability
How will this platform be set up, how will it be sustained: by individual subscriptions? By regional or national taxes? By private contributions? By continued EC funding? By new distributed and ICT-enabled approaches such as microfinance or P2P finance?

International aspects
Could we achieve the necessary recognition at worldwide level to have an impact at planetary scale? Does it have to be a Europe-only, first step, or could others in US or China buy in?

by Fabrizio Sestini at European Commission, 2011. Free quoting from this page is allowed provided that the source is mentioned and linked. Any views expressed in this page are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission.

- Collective Awareness